With the increasing number of mobile communication terminals (e.g. cell phones, PDAs, pagers, sensors, etc) being able to determine its own geographical location either via GPS modules and/or similar positioning techniques, modern communication terminals have a high degree of self awareness with respect to their current location. This allows for not only creation of new applications but also facilitation of certain functionality in the lower layers of the communication protocol stack.
The 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) standards already started to make use of such location awareness capability by, for example, suggesting that a CSG (Closed Subscriber Group) cell (i.e., a femto cells or a cell operated by a Home Base Station) could be “fingerprinted” to its location, such that the user can quickly find the cell in the future.
Another item identified in the standards is MDT (Minimization of Drive Tests). This feature allows a mobile terminal to report to the network a set of measurements, including, optionally, its location (whenever available).
Further, location information of a mobile terminal may be used to optimize neighbor cell measurements and cell reselection procedures for UEs (User Equipemants) in RRC_IDLE state.
In summary, more and more functionality is currently being identified where location information can be of great help to a mobile terminal, not only from an application point of view, but in a more holistic manner. The additional functionality that may benefit from a mobile terminal's location awareness may reside, for instance, in the NAS (Non-Access Stratum), the RRC (Radio Resource Control) layer, or any other of the lower layers of the LTE (Long-Term Evolution) protocol stack.